By Daniel Vlasaty

I haven’t liked this book from the beginning, but I keep coming back. I don’t know why. Maybe I hate myself. Or maybe I’m just hoping against hope that Winnebago Graveyard will get better because it’s not all terrible. I like the idea of this book. I like what I think it’s trying to do. But sadly issue #3 doesn’t do anything better than the previous two issues. If anything this might be the worst one yet. Which sucks, because – believe it or not – I don’t actually like giving bad reviews. But anyway, here’s my review of issue #3 of Winnebago Graveyard.

This issue has so many problems that I don’t even really know where to begin. The first thing I’d like to start with is the pacing. I think it took me all of six minutes to read this. There is almost no connection between the things that happen here. You’re just hit – boom, boom, boom – with one thing after another. And literally none of them make any sense. This is the third issue and by now I feel like we should start having some kind of understanding about what the fuck is going on. We should at least somewhat like the characters. There should be something that connects us to them. But I still can’t find one thing about any of them that I even remotely like. And I think it’s because there’s literally nothing there. Neither good nor bad. The characters barely talk and when they do it’s to say how scared they are or that they want to go home. Some of the terrifying shit they’re going through and you’d think they bond together, become stronger as a unit. But they’re not. They’re just blank nothings, not reacting or emoting at all.

The story isn’t that unique of one. A town with a dark and violent secret, the things they do to outsiders for fun or sacrifice. It’s been done before in the horror genre. But here it’s executed so poorly that it seriously makes me embarrassed as a fan of comic books and horror as a whole. There is no depth or weight to anything that is happening. Even to the people that it is happening to, they seem indifferent toward it. Sadly, there is not much to like here. And there’s less of a reason to even continue reading the book.

Honestly, though, the worst thing here is the art. It’s too sloppy and inconsistent and, really, just a mess. I never thought much about layouts before, but here they are awful. The angles are bad and the panels are cropped in weird ways. Characters are cut off by panel lines and there seems to be very little thought put into spacial relations, and how the character and the other objects filling space interact with each other.

There is usually at least one good thing to say about art, even in comic books where it’s bad. But, seriously, I can’t think of one good thing to say right now. I. Just. Can’t.

If I had to stretch and force myself into saying one positive thing about it though it would be that the creature design is not terrible. I think if it were being drawn by someone else it would even be okay. But here it’s just too sloppy and messy to be even kind of enjoyable.

All in all, Winnebago Graveyard is a mess. I don’t have anything else to say.